Canadian Labour Blogging

Uncorrected Proofs has a three part article on the Labour Movement in Canada and Quebec and its response, or lack of response, to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Disorganized Labour: Unions and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms - Part One

Disorganized Labour: Unions and the Chater of Rights and Freedoms - Part Two

Disorganized Labour: Unions and the Chater of Rights and Freedoms - Part Three

Relentlessly Progressive Economics reports on Buzz Hargrove's take on Kyoto; and comments on the conflict between Small Business and Unions; Why small independent businesses should be pro union


Daily Dissidence reports on the six month long Credit Union workers strike in Ontario; COPE 343 Strike Update

Ken Chapman addresses the issue of safety on the job in Alberta, or lack thereof...Workplace Deaths Increasing in Alberta - Improved Literacy is Part of the Solution.

And since today is May Day check out these Posts at Progressive Bloggers.


See:

Happy May Day

Day of Mourning

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Keystone Kops and Air India

As I predicted;

Police had trouble piecing together Air India clues, inquiry told

Canadian Cops Laughed At Air India Warning

CSIS had Air India warning

Police ignored Air India warnings

Police learned of Air India plot months before bombing

Police had hint 11 days before 1985 disaster, inquiry on Air India.

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Green Nazi's

A case of pot, kettle, black.

There is something ironic in this....PM's climate stance worse than appeasing Nazis: Green leader

Oh yeah it's this;

This week Parliament heard one of its strangest speeches ever, the Green-Nazi speech. The author, Liberal Senator George Brandis, was attempting to condemn Greens leader Bob Brown for interjections he made during President Bush's recent address. Evidently inspired by newspaper columnist Andrew Bolt, Senator Brandis quoted from scholarly texts tracing the origins of Green politics right back to the German "Volkish" movement in the mid-19th century. It was a mystical, naturist movement that fused with the age-old hatred of Jews and just 80 years later gave birth to a vegetarian dictator called Adolf Hitler. Senator Brandis warned that just as Hitler came to power by manipulating free elections, so too "the sinister and fanatical views represented by Green politicians can grow and gain strength under the cover of democracy".


And this;
Ecofascism / Fascist Ideology: The Green Wing of the Nazi Party


Or this;

Thanks for the Cheap Gas, Mr. Hitler!
How Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa perfected one of the world's most exciting new fuel sources.

The circuitous travels of the Fischer-Tropsch process, a chemical technique to convert natural gas and coal into liquid fuels, provide an object lesson in historical irony. Used by the Nazis to make oil from coal during World War II, it was commercialized by the century's second-most-odious racial supremacist regime in the 1950s through South Africa's state energy company. Now, that privatized company, Sasol, may help liberate Western democracies (and non-Western ones, like India) from the grip of crude oil produced largely by loathsome authoritarian regime.

Not to forget this;

Himmler's Horticulture

The Nazi story in Germany was a story of biophilia gone bad. A confused and desperate people--suffering from the Versailles Treaty, the loss of World War I, and economic depression--seized, for pride and identity, the imagery of their own blood and soil. It was impossible to spice up "superiority" with architecture (the Greeks and Romans were not Germans) or literature and art (the French and Italians were not Germans). So "blood" (the Teutonic tribes of yesteryear) and "soil" (the plants within the Germanic provenance) became the hooks on which to hang nativism, racism, and self-confidence. The future Germany was to be a pure landscape inhabitated by an untainted race.

Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, a major historian of the native plant movement in Germany, claims that native plants "became the landscape architect's swastika." He quotes Alwyn Seifert (a leading German landscape architect during the Nazi period) as saying "nothing foreign should be added, and nothing native should be left out." The ideological attention to pure bloodlines led Nazitime botanists to advocate a "war of extermination" against a foreign impatiens felt to be out-competing the "native" impatiens. With the invasion of Poland, Heinrich Himmler pressed Nazi policy-makers to complete the Reich's Landscape Law to force the exclusive use of native plants within its empire. Nature had been nationalized and became totalitarian and violently enforced. You are as your plants.

Can you be progressive and a Green Nazi?

Anarcho-Green Nazis

As long ago as 1989 Searchlight, the anti-fascist magazine, was running front cover features on what it described as 'the greening of the brownshirts.' For many years former National Front activists have been setting up quasi-green organisations as recruiting fronts for their vile activities, but it is only more recently that the anarchist movement has been targeted as a potential vehicle for Nazi propaganda. Former National Front boss Patrick Harrington has even managed to get a letter published in the latest issue of the American journal Anarchy, in which he writes 'as a life-long vegetarian and pagan, I am genuinely interested in green issues... I do not see any contradiction between this and my other views , indeed I regard them as interlinked.'

A number of anarchists have been won over by this claim and it is these individuals who are most likely to succeed in getting it across to a wider public. The most notorious anarchist convert to National Front style racism is Richard Hunt, the founder of Green Anarchist and the driving force behind the magazine Alternative Green. Hunt vents his racism in anti-Irish rants with headlines such as Off Our Patch Paddy. Alternative Green has also run articles supporting the 'red and brown' united front fighting against democracy in Russia, and currently argues for tough immigration and deportation laws. More sinister still is Richard Hunt's claim that the population must be reduced by 75% if we are to have an ecologically sustainable society. Hunt doesn't make it clear whether he wishes to set up death camps or if people will simply be left to starve to death.

Could Elizabeth May and the Green Party end up like this?

Libertarian National Socialist (Nazi) Green Party

Why not? Like Paul Watson her politics are the new Third way and they represent the declasse middle class, the very base of fascism.

"We recognise that separating humanity from nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind's own destruction and to the death of nations. Only through a re-integration of humanity into the whole of nature can our people be made stronger . . . This striving toward connectedness with the totality of life, with nature itself, a nature into which we are born, this is the deepest meaning and the true essence of National Socialist thought."

That was Ernst Lehmann, a leading biologist under the Nazi regime, in 1934, and he wasn't alone. Hitler, for one, was an avid vegetarian and green, addicted to homeopathic cures. His regime sponsored the creation of organic farming, and SS leader Heinrich Himmler even grew herbs on his own organic farm with which to treat his beloved troops. HITLER also banned medical experiments on animals, but not, as we know to our grief, on Jewish children. And he created many national parks, particularly for Germany's "sacred" forests.

This isn't a coincidence. The Nazis drew heavily on a romantic, anti-science, nature worshipping, communal and anti-capitalist movement that tied German identity to German forests. In fact, Professor Raymond Dominick notes in his book, The Environmental Movement in Germany, two-thirds of the members of Germany's main nature clubs had joined the Nazi Party by 1939, compared with just 10 per cent of all men. The Nazis also absorbed the German Youth Movement, the Wandervogel, which talked of our mystical relationship with the earth.

Peter Staudenmaier, co-author of Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience, says it was for the Wandervogel that the philosopher Ludwig Klages wrote his influential essay Man and Earth in 1913. In it, Klages warned of the growing extinction of species, the destruction of forests, the genocide of aboriginal peoples, the disruption of the ecosystem and the killing of whales. People were losing their relationship with nature, he warned. Heard all that recently? I'm not surprised. This essay by this notorious anti-Semite was republished in 1980 to mark the birth of the German Greens -- the party that inspired the creation of our own Greens party. Its message is much as Hitler's own in Mein Kampf: "When people attempt to rebel against the iron logic of nature, they come into conflict with the very same principles to which they owe their existence as human beings. Their actions against nature must lead to their own downfall."

Why does this matter now? Because we must learn that people who want animals to be treated like humans really want humans to be treated like animals. We must realise a movement that stresses "natural order" and the low place of man in a fragile world, is more likely to think man is too insignificant to stand in the way of Mother Earth, or the Fatherland, or some other man-hating god. We see it already. A Greenpeace co-founder, Paul Watson, called humans the "AIDS of the earth", and one of the three key founders of the German Greens, Herbert Gruhl, said the environmental crisis was so acute the state needed perhaps "dictatorial powers".

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Happy May Day

The Worker’s May-Pole
(1894)

See:

May Day Lotta Continua

Tax Time and Walpurgisnacht

May Week in Redmonton

Gnostic Easter

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Prince of Peace?

While social conservative protestants attack Muslim claims to being a peaceful religion, how come some of these same folks celebrate Jesus not as a prince of peace but as Christ the Warrior King.


Of course with a President that talks to God we are seeing a revival of that old time religion of Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.


Not to be outdone at least one Protestant sect is now proclaiming themselves followers of the Anti-Christ. Which some folks think Bush is too.



See:

Secularism Vs. Fundamentalism

Gnostic Easter

Pauline Origins of Social Conservatism

Pat Robertson Anti-Christ

An Antidote to Bush

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Harpers Big Lie

Following in the footsteps of that other right wing government that promoted law and order, Harper embraces the politics of the Big Lie;

As the Conservatives set out to focus on crime this week in Parliament, Prime Minister Stephen Harper delivered a kickoff speech on Thursday arguing that crime rates are high by historic standards and there is now a trend to more serious crime.

But does the Prime Minister's message match the statistics?

Reported crime rates have generally fallen over the past 15 years.

"Even if Canada's crime rates are low by international standards, they are still very high by our own historical standards," Mr. Harper told an awards dinner for the York Regional Police Force.

While it's true that reported crime rates are far higher than when Mr. Harper, born in 1959, was a child, he didn't mention that they have been declining relatively steadily since 1992.

There was a dramatic increase in the 1960s and 1970s in most of the Western world, which may be partly ascribed to a younger population because of the baby boomers, but it has never been adequately explained, University of Toronto criminologist Anthony Doob said.

"They peaked in the early 1990s, and then drifted downward," he said.

That's especially true of the overall crime rate, which fell almost 25 per cent from 10,342 crime incidents per 100,000 people in 1991 to 7,761 in 2005, the last year reported by the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics.

The rate of violent crime fell less dramatically, by 7.6 per cent, since 1992.

Of course this is just another in the Big Lies that the Harpocrites have foisted on the public since coming to power.

There is the torture of Afghan prisoners Big Lie

There is the Kyoto Big Lie

The Afghanistan War Big Lie

The Child Care Big Lie

The Waiting Times Big Lie

The Income Trust Big Lie



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Amen

Lawrence Martin sums it up well in his Globe and Mail comment from yesterday. The NDP is the voice of progressive activists in Canada, not the Liberals.

In the 1970s, the activists, their views vindicated on Vietnam, were in the vanguard. In this decade, the activists, their views vindicated on Iraq, not to mention global warming, have no such standing.

Speak out back then and you were cool. Speak out today and some fount of wisdom with a Fox News mentality will come down on you -- to borrow a phrase from Hunter S. Thompson -- "like a million pound sh-thammer."

Speak out today and, as silly as it sounds, you'll be accused of Bush-bashing -- as if it isn't warranted. In the last election campaign, Paul Martin's Liberals found out what the atmosphere was like when they underwent a media pounding for taking on the United States on certain questions.

That campaign has had a lingering effect, silencing Liberal voices, who kept Canada out of Iraq, on the big American questions of today. The Conservatives, former supporters of that war, are more inclined to join hands with the administration than pursue what Andrew Caddell, one of our United Nations officials, calls innovative multilateralism.

Among the few who challenge Washington are the NDP's Jack Layton and groups such as the Council of Canadians and the Centre for Policy Alternatives. They stick their necks out, only to get either ignored or berated by conservative media elites who would be more convincing if their track record on such matters as Iraq and the green file wasn't so dismal by comparison.

See:

Harpers Fascism

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Union M&A

I raised this issue last week and Barrie McKenna in todays Globe and Mail questions Mergers and Acquisitions in the labour movement. The alternative to the labour movements version of corporatism is One Big Union. Instead of organizing the unorganized, like Starbucks workers, these old industrial based business unions are organizing for their retirement.

On this May Day - also know as International Workers' Day - it's worth asking the question, why merge at all?

The venture may prove to be a lot less ambitious than advertised. The three unions said they would engage in co-ordinated campaigning on issues such as human and labour rights in Colombia, China and elsewhere, as well as common approaches to contract negotiations with multinational companies.

The barriers to more fundamental transatlantic co-operation are substantial, including different labour laws, political systems and employers.

Nor is it clear how the merger would help overcome the greatest challenge facing organized labour - dwindling membership. The vast majority of workers in all three countries aren't union members. In Canada, just a quarter of the civilian labour force belonged to a union last year, down from nearly 30 per cent at the beginning of the 1990s. The comparable numbers for the United States and Britain are 12 per cent and 28.4 per cent, respectively, and the shares continue to fall every year.

The Steelworkers have bucked the trend, but mainly by swallowing other unions, rather than internal growth. And like many unions, nearly a third of its members are retirees, whose ranks are unlikely to be replenished with new union members.

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CPC Bright Idea

Before the Conservative Party of Canada declared incandescent light bulbs illegal in Canada the Communist Party of Cuba beat them to it. And Castro like the Harper Government is promoting Bio-Fuels, though not the way they are.....

Under the headline "It is time for an energy revolution right now," Castro, 80, addressed US-Brazilian cooperation on biofuels, and urged that the issue be discussed on International Workers' Day.

"Insatiable in its demand, the empire has called on the world to produce biofuels to free the United States from dependence on imported oil," Castro wrote in the Communist Party newspaper Granma.

"Nothing is stopping US and European capital from financing biofuels. They could even give the funds to Brazil and Latin America.

"And the United States, Europe and other industrialized countries would save more than 140 billion dollars every year, with no concern whatsoever for the fallout in terms of climate change and hunger, which will affect developing countries the most.

"They will always have enough money left over for biofuels and buying at any price whatever food is available in the global market."

Among other things, Castro called for a wholesale replacement of incandescent lights with fluorescent bulbs, and massive replacement of domestic and commercial systems using older technologies that require two to three times more energy than new systems.

SEE:

The New Cuban Revolution

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May Day Lotta Continua

May Day the International Workers Day and the Struggle Continues (Lotta Continua)

As long as the struggle of the workers against the bourgeoisie and the ruling class continues, as long as all demands are not met, May Day will be the yearly expression of these demands. And, when better days dawn, when the working class of the world has won its deliverance then too humanity will probably celebrate May Day in honor of the bitter struggles and the many sufferings of the past. Rosa Luxemburg 1894

Nigerian workers: still searching for succour

Today, the first day of May, otherwise called Workers Day in Nigeria, no longer has any meaning to many a Nigerian worker. It is doubtful if the workers understand the significance of the day as one set aside to recognize the valour and sacrifice of the creators of the nation’s wealth. The average Nigerian worker does not see any need for the celebration of his contribution to nation building or for his efforts to ensure that the country of his birth becomes prosperous so that he can live an assured life in future. The day to him now provides the opportunity to show the world the level of his impoverishment

FOR some time now, the May Day celebration has become a day for wilful display of anger by Nigerian workers against their employers, both government and private. Nowadays, industrial unions of both the public and organized private sectors look forward to the Workers Day to publicly vent their spleen against the soulless establishments that have grounded the nation’s social machinery that would have ensured and enhanced the quality of life in the nation. As such, the venues of the Day’s celebrations across the country are usually rally grounds where the workers loudly bemoan their pitiful conditions and declaim the nation’s rulers for making the lives of Nigerian workers laborious.

THAT the venues of May Day rally have been turned into agitation ground is an indication of the virtual collapse of the nation’s social structures and the erosion of the lives of the nation’s teeming masses. The Nigerian worker has made a singsong of his pitiable social conditions. He is one of the poorly paid workers (if not the poorest) in the world. There has not been any time his take-home pay has been made adequate by his employer to give him the much needed lifeline. In spite of his resourcefulness, experience and contributions he is hardly able to live from hand to mouth.

BUT as most social scientists like Adam Smith have postulated, the real wealth of any nation is not in the tangible resources like gold, silver or crude oil. The wealth of a nation is not in the quality or arability of its land. The real wealth can only be found in the quality of its human resources. A highly cultivated human resource, in terms of good and quality education, highly enhanced salary package and functional social amenities, will, without doubt, be highly motivated and resourceful and very productive. Conversely, a workforce that is poorly remunerated will only produce a very low yield. In both cases, the society is at the receiving end. In other words, the quality (and lack of it) of any workforce will translate into the prosperity (and otherwise) of that particular society.

THE fact that Nigeria has enjoyed unqualified status among the “scum of the earth” shows the extent to which its people have been degraded and dehumanized. The nation is ranked among the poorest countries of the world in spite of its enormous natural resources; it holds an un-exalted position as one of the most corrupt nations in the world and as one of the most looted nations, looted and raped by its own citizens. What all this shows is that the nation has not invested adequately in its human resources and this has made it possible for the emergence of the uncouth and rogue leaders who raped and looted the nation’s essence and still got away with their crimes. The failure to cultivate good citizenship has made possible the collapse of the nation’s economic and social structures and led to the creation of criminals in both low and high places. The result of this is the present collapse of the nation’s social structures.

And in an ironic twist of fate the original Lotta Continua in Italy were the subject of a political witch hunt in the Seventies and Eighties. Like the Strega of Old.

LOTTA CONTINUA

Italy has always had a particularly active political Left and in the late '60s and early '70s an extraparliamentary faction that descended into propagandist violence. In the so-called Hot Autumn of 1969, a bomb exploded in the Agricultural Bank in Milan, killing 16 people. An anarchist railway man, Giuseppe Pinelli, was taken in for questioning by the police. Three days later, Pinelli (immortalized in Dario Fo's play The Accidental Death of an Anarchist) fell to his death from the window of the police commissioner Luigi Calabresi's office. The police claimed suicide but the Left accused them of murder. In 1972 Calabresi was shot dead in front of his home. The far-left Lotta Continua claimed it was an act of proletarian justice but many think right-wing extremists were involved. After almost 16 years of silence, an ex-militant of Lotta, riven with guilt, gave himself up, claiming responsibility for the murder. Leonardo Marino then implicated the leadership of Lotta in the affair.

Carlo Ginzburg, a noted and respected historian, draws on his work on witchcraft trials in the 16th and 17th centuries to dissect the state's case in this late-20th-century show trial. He has written a provocative and passionate book that casts a detailed look at the facts of the case, facts that when presented here cast serious doubt on the judgments reached in Italy early in 1999.

Judge and the Historian: Marginal Notes on a Late-Twentieth-Century Miscarriage of Justice. Translated by Antony Shugaar. New York: Verso, 1999. There is a sort of general democratic interest in showing how a concrete trial functions. --Carlo Ginzburg, Liberation (October 9, 1997) Social conflict in Italy during the late 1960s and early 1970s had a particular breadth and impact. Radical-left movements like Lotta Continua championed factory occupations and large demonstrations and saw the Communist Party and labor unions as stifling the workers' revolutionary project. ^1 Elements within the state responded with "the strategy of tension": exceptional police brutality and an instrumental approach to extreme-right violence (the cause of more deaths than extreme-left violence), often carried out sub rosa in conjunction with state secret services and intended by some to destabilize the state and create the basis for an authoritarian regime. In the mid-1970s, Italy promulgated a series of exceptional laws that bolstered police powers at the expense of individual rights and gave a special place to informers; increased the time an individual could be held in preventive detention; and made individuals of the same group liable for the same sentence despite differences in individuals' actions. ^2 Faced with declining expectations for revolution, factions [End Page 135] of the extreme left turned to vanguard party terrorism.

Ginzburg regards the convictions in the Calabresi case as the 20th century equivalent of the witchcraft and heresy convictions under the Inquisition. The contemporary Italian courts, he says, cared just as little for the evidence as the 16th and 17th century Catholic ones: Suspects could affirm their crimes, deny all or remain silent, and all these possible responses were regarded as evidence of their guilt. The Calabresi judges ended up believing the informer, Leonardo Marino, despite the dozens of problems Ginzburg cites with his story, any one of which, he says, should have created more than the shadow of a doubt and led to acquittal.

Ginzburg, a specialist in probing sixteenth-century inquisitorial records and
writing micro histories of the victims, uses court documents to scrutinise the
notorious May 1990 conviction of his friend of thirty years, the journalist Adriano
Sofri. Founder and leader of the radical left-wing group Lotta Continua from the
1960s until its dissolution in 1976, Sofri, along with his two co-defendants, was
pronounced guilty of the 17 May 1972 murder of the police superintendent Luigi
Calabresi, widely believed to be responsible for the death under interrogation of an
accused suspect three years earlier. Almost the entire case against Sofri rested on the testimony of one former Lotta Continua militant, Leonardo Marino. After a second career as an armed robber, Marino confessed in 1987 to a parish priest and in 1988 to three carabinieri offices his role as the driver in Calabresi’s assassination; he also named his former Lotta comrade Ovidio Bompressi as the murderer and two others, Sofri and Giorgio Pietrostafani, as the authors of the deed (pp. 8–11). Despite his long-delayed declaration of guilt as well as important errors and inconsistencies in his testimony, Marino’s accusations were never seriously challenged.

Ginzburg, although a renowned investigator of non-elites under pressure from
forces from above, was uninterested in Marino or his astrologer companion Antonia Bistolfi. While deftly demolishing Marino’s testimony, Ginzburg neglected to examine the bases of the ex-thief’s repentance, which had so powerful an impact
on the court.

Instead, Ginzburg’s main subject is the presiding judge Antonio Lombardi, who
‘with a clear conscience’ and ‘absolutely no doubt’ pronounced the ‘complete
reliability [of] Marino’s statements’ (p. 103). Although acknowledging that historians and judges share the practice of contextualising their evidence, Ginzburg demands a far higher threshold of proof from the figure handing out sentences and berates Lombardi for his reckless and illogical leap in validating Marino’s questionable story and condemning Sofri (pp. 110–18).

Unlike the Papon trial, where prominent historians gave contrasting views of the Vichy past, the Sofri trial was dominated by the judge’s and the prosecutor’s shared trauma of a decade of violence. Thus, The suspect, a railway worker named Giuseppe Pinelli, either fell, jumped or was pushed out the window of Calabresi’s office while under questioning about the bomb blast on 12 Dec. 1969 in the Banca dell’Agricoltura in Milan that had killed seventeen people and injured eighty-eight others. The subsequent official investigation showed that right-wing extremists, aided by the Italian secret services, had set the bomb.

Donald Reid, ‘The Historian and the Judges’, Radical History Review 80 (Spring 2001), p. 144, n. 4. Lotta Continua immediately denounced Calabresi for the murder; the incident was the subject of Nobel Prize-winner Dario Fo’s play, The Accidental Death of an Anarchist. Marino gave the wrong color of the stolen car and incorrectly described the assassination route (pp. 22–5, 72–97). ‘I do not know what pushed Marino to lie. The psychological motivations . . . seem . . . wholly irrelevant.’ (p. 97). according to Ginzburg, much like the earlier inquisitors, they were all too ready to accept even the most defective confirmatory evidence.

To be sure, in writing as an advocate for the defence Carlo Ginzburg appears
to have suspended his own critical judgement. Not only are most witnesses in
criminal trials unreliable, forgetful and self-contradictory, particularly sixteen years after the event, but also key evidence is often missing.25 Nonetheless, The Judge and the Historian is itself an important historical document. Underlying Ginzburg’s approach is a spirited defence of old-fashioned historical inquiry against the postmodern challenge, as well as a strong assertion of the existence of proof and of truth (pp. 16–17).26 Moreover, a century after another flawed trial, Ginzburg’s J’accuse not only demonstrates how those in power continue to rewrite history (in this case holding Lotta Continua responsible for ‘the years of lead’) but also suggests disquieting links with Italy’s Fascist past (pp. 119–20)

A H/T to Terry Glavin


Also See:

May Week in Redmonton

Tax Time and Walpurgisnacht

The Origins and Traditions of May Day

Anarchist Mayor of Milan

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